Monday, January 29, 2007

This time they're painting what could be discribe as 'chicanes' in racing. Allow me a mutilated attempt to describe it.

This starts near the intersection, 2 parallel yellow lines snake from the center to 1/5 or 1/4 into the right lane then curves back into the center, across it and half into the left lane. Got it? Same from the other side of the intersection but starts on the opposite lane. Got that?

No? Just go and see for yourself.

Anyway, this has the effect of NARROWING a 2-lane highway into a tight 2-lane highway. Very tight. AND this happened at an intersection where a section of the banked, curving road VISIBLY narrows, for some reason. So we have: a) a narrow section of a highway; b) traffic markings making the roads even NARROWER on both sides.

This leads me to believe that whoever the IDIOT who recommended doing it this way was, maybe, using only a MAP as a REFERENCE and HAS NOT SEEN THE SITE. On the other hand, this bright bulb (or bulbs) might have surrounded himself (or herself, let's be fair) or themselves with IDIOTS. Pssst... people, I've heard that there are traffic modeling softwares out there where you can experiment these things and not bother REAL people driving REAL cars paying REAL money for expensively REAL gas on REAL roads with REAL traffic and REAL danger of accidents.

Oh, and another thing, the contractor painted some lane markers and such last November and December 2006 have now faded. Shame really since they MANUALLY labored so hard hand painting them with paint rollers.